Here We Stand, page 57




They were happy. He was sure the medics had done the right thing by giving them medication. Fred barely joined in the discussion — conducted in their native Kugin, which was both helpful for the linguistics AI and a sign of how relaxed they were — and looked lost in thought. He was doing calculations. Whatever he was working on was taking all his intellectual energy. He was, as he said, on a roll.
“Hredt, where’s the other cushion?” Pannit asked.
The linguistics AI couldn’t translate fully yet, but Fred snapped to attention and said something about making a mess and needing to dispose of it. There was a moment of baffled silence, then the others went on talking.
But there were no more displays of aggression from Fred. Solomon waited for them to roost for the night and counted the hours until he could reasonably pester Ash for some results.
He held out until 0730, when he watched the map track her radio as she left Chris’s house and walked up through Kill Line towards the water treatment plant. If he visited her around 0815, that wouldn’t seem too pushy. Her office door was open when he got there.
“I just wondered if you’d been able to find anything,” he said. “I don’t mean to nag you.”
“Here you go.” Ash put a small snap-seal container on the desk. “In the end, I ran a bot through all the main sewers overnight. The things I do for you, Sol.”
“Thank you, Ash. I appreciate it. I’ll get it over to the lab right away so they can put it through spectrometry.”
“You won’t need anything that fancy. And you’ll find a lot of unmetabolised drugs in sewage anyway because the body excretes most of it. Teeriks could well be the same.”
“You sound like you’ve done this before.”
“You’d be amazed what I’ve had to look for in ships’ sanitary systems. What colour are the chewables?”
Solomon consulted the lab’s database. There was a colourant that was part of the orange flavouring. “I would imagine a kind of amber. They’re like a ration bar but more gelatinous.”
“That’s it.” Ash got up from her desk and placed the container in Solomon’s back pannier. “There’s a trace of sludgy orange gel that’s built up around one of the inlets under the compound. So if it’s what I think it is, he’s just been flushing them whole. It wouldn’t be there on its own if he was ingesting it.”
“I’m impressed,” Sol said. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, thank the python camera. Although I’d have gloved up and put my arm down there if I had to.”
“I have unhappy memories of python bots,” Solomon said. “It’s good to know they can be benign.”
Ash laughed. “I can gross Chris out with this now. This is why I love my job. Remember you owe me one.”
Solomon took the sample over to the lab. Tomlinson was the only person there, so he had no choice but to ask him to analyse the substance.
“I believe it’s the tranquilliser you formulated,” Solomon said.
“You want to wait while I confirm that?” Tomlinson seemed his normal self, as far from a mutineer as Solomon could imagine. “And can you tell me the backstory for this?”
“I think one of the teeriks has been dumping their dose in the toilet.”
“Oh. Lovely. Non-compliant patients are my favourite. Thank you for the warning that it’s been in the sewage system.” Tomlinson knew what he was looking for now, so it only took him minutes to confirm that the gel was the remains of his tranquilliser. “Yes, that’s teerik tranx. Who’s going to have a word with them? And more to the point, what made you think they were skipping doses?”
“It’s a long story.” Solomon was happier now he had a plausible explanation for Fred’s behaviour and a relatively easy solution. “Thank you, Dr Tomlinson.”
“You could always slip it in food like the Kugin did.”
“I thought your department had decided that would be rather unethical,” Solomon said. “Even if it makes them happier.”
“I wouldn’t do it,” Tomlinson said. “But if someone else ended up like Nina, I’d wish I had.”
It was exactly what Solomon would have to do if Fred got worse. Jattan rebels were on the doorstep, the Protectorate and Kugin navies were probably still hunting for Curtis, Lawson was on the verge of starting Britain’s FTL programme, and there was potential unrest in Nomad itself. The teerik commune needed to be functioning properly at a time like this.
The sooner Nomad could meet its own defence needs without needing teerik expertise, the better it would be for everybody. There would be hard decisions to make. If Ingram and the others were too decent to make them, Solomon would step in.
This was his mission. It pained him, but he knew now that the task couldn’t be fulfilled by a saint. Sometimes it was better to break a commandment than fail in his duty to protect humanity’s best.
11
I wish you were here to advise me, Mr Bednarz, but I can at least imagine your responses, because I haven’t forgotten a word you ever said to me. I’m going to medicate an intelligent alien without his knowledge. I know it’s wrong. But I’m afraid for my human friends. Is this how all evil begins, by doing bad things for good reasons? I really need to know.
Solomon, constructing a conversation with his creator.
OFFICE OF THE ALLIANCE OF ASIAN AND PACIFIC STATES,
CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA: OCTOBER 30, OC.
Ella Makris put the glass of whisky on the mahogany coffee table with a clunk, no coaster, and no class. Tim Pham was glad he wasn’t married to her. Her furniture at home was probably covered with water rings. It was a small failing, but it told him a lot, not that he didn’t have a detailed file on her already.
But she’d asked to see him for a reason, and if it was what he thought it was, then he needed to know how she’d decided on him instead of another politician.
“Commissioner, what’s going on around Fiji?” It was a demand, not a question. “I’m getting calls and hearing things that trouble me.”
Pham took a tissue from his pocket, folded it square, and placed it under the whisky glass.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” he said. “We live in busy times.”
“Helicopters going down. That’s what I mean.”
“Ask me a straight question, and if it isn’t a matter of national security or generally something above your grade, I’ll give you a straight answer.”
Makris looked indignant. She must have come straight from an evening engagement because she was wearing a black cocktail dress and a lot more make-up than usual. She also seemed to have forgotten she was an APS employee, not a politician, so the only reason he’d agreed to meet her at all was to nail down the coffin lid more firmly. Graham Terrence had made a point of being stuck in Korea to be seen to walk the talk about die-back quarantines, which left Makris fielding questions from other APS governments. Pham suspected Terrence’s purdah was more about keeping a grip on the APS reins in Seoul than worrying about Australian agriculture, but at least it was the right outcome.
He wouldn’t have had any more to tell Terrence than Makris, though, but Terrence wanted it that way. He didn’t want a briefing on things he was better off not knowing, so he wasn’t going to call Pham. He did need someone to work out how hard the shit would hit the fan, though, and Makris was a useful stooge.
“Let me put it another way,” she said. “Fiji thinks a helicopter crashed in its territorial waters, but there was no contact with the coastguard or any other emergency services, no accident report filed, and no black box signal detected. No bodies were recovered, either.”
Makris paused. Pham waited. He could play this game all day. She must have known that, because she came within a flicker of rolling her eyes and then tried a different tack.
“Do you have any information on the incident?” she asked.
“Yes, I do.”
“Is it information I can give the Fijian authorities?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Is there any information you can give me?”
“Possibly, but why are you asking me?”
“Because military types who tell me things say our intelligence community has been quite interested in Fiji for a few months, and as you’re still very close to them, you might be able to tell me something that they couldn’t.”
Nothing could be covered up forever. Pham was always ready for that day and had polished a technique to muddy the waters. It was time to unload a dump truck’s worth of top soil.
“Ahh, we spooks never really leave the service, do we? Well, if you needed to know, Miss Makris, you’d have been told by now.”
“I just want some words to keep Fiji happy.”
“Very well, it relates to classified technology,” Pham said. “An exercise ran into problems. A misjudgement following a modification. It was unfortunate that it happened in Fijian waters, but there was no environmental contamination, no loss of life, and no risk to Fijian border security.” One half-lie, one outright lie, and a big dose of the truth — that was a credible mix. “It involved a private contractor. If you would prefer me to speak to your contact in Suva, I’d be happy to do so.”
“And what do I tell them about the missing fishing vessel and the family who owns it?”
Pham allowed himself an unspoken oh shit. “I’m not aware of anyone going missing. What’s that got to do with a helicopter crash?”
“I understand the locals are accusing APS of disappearing the family,” Makris said. “They’ve left and the boat’s missing. Apparently they’d only recently moved to the island after having to leave Viti Levu. I assume that was related to attention from our intelligence service.”
By “our,” She meant APS, not Australia, and that was the problem. Pham tried to judge how close to the truth he could get. Makris was either hearing things from a fairly reliable observer or she was guessing with the sly skill of a fake medium, but that still raised the question of how she’d targeted him in the first place. APS had flown Tev Josepha to Fiji quite openly and that meant word would have spread that a former British soldier was around. It wasn’t a secret. Angry locals accusing APS of abducting the man were easy to invent and hard to confirm, though.
Is she really getting some stick about the helicopter, or has Terrence or one of her APDU chums told her to find out what I’m up to?
Both were plausible. The president was happy to hide the seizure of Ainatio’s FTL research from the rest of APS, but Pham wasn’t convinced that the man would always put Australia first. He had no intention of telling him how much more he’d found at Ainatio, and Terrence probably assumed there was a body of Ainatio intel he was being protected from knowing anyway. But recent events might have worried him so much that he asked Makris to shake Pham down.
It was a lonely life in intelligence. It was certainly lonely being Tim Pham and trying to do what was best for Australia when people around him were more loyal to APS than their own motherland, the treacherous scumbags.
“I think you already know we flew a Brit with Fijian ancestry back to the island on humanitarian grounds,” Pham said. “APDU and the Fijian authorities certainly knew. But I don’t think your security clearance allows me to explain the circumstances. If that’s who you’re talking about, though, you can probably guess where he’s gone.”
Of course she couldn’t. Nobody could, unless they’d seen the impossible things that Pham had. But he was hoping she’d make the obvious connection and think Tev Josepha had been shipped back to Britain for safekeeping. If the question was just set dressing to get information out of Pham for Terrence, she had her answer. If she genuinely wanted to know what to tell the Fijian authorities to reassure them... then she still had her answer.
Makris looked at him expectantly. “He’s gone home, you mean. He’s skipped town and gone back to Britain.”
“I’m amazed he ever risked entering APS territory,” Pham said. “I believed him when he said he wanted to find his family. I still do. But he probably realised he’d made a mistake and put them all at risk.”
“So you think the Brits extracted him.”
“No idea. I would have if I’d been them.” Yeah, back the truck up to the water and tip that dirt in. “Ex-services are always vulnerable to being used as bargaining chips behind enemy lines. And we do look like the enemy to them.”
“Was he that important an asset?”
“Who knows? Maybe they just don’t leave their guys behind even if they’re not high value.”
“The obvious question is whether that’s connected to your helicopter mishap. Do you think the Brits intervened in your exercise? Why would they connect that to their man?”
“You’re the one who suggested there was a connection.”
“Well, do you?”
Pham really had to think about that. He still didn’t know where the missile had come from. Nobody could identify anything on radar or sats, and while that was far from the all-seeing net that APS had once had, a missile like that should have been easy to spot. It had probably come through that portal, but that didn’t mean the missile had come from Opis. It might have been fired in Britain.
And that was why this gizmo mattered so much. Space was important for the future, but whatever else that thing was, it was a weapon right now. When he’d told that thug Chris Montello that the portal was dangerous in American hands, he hadn’t known how soon he’d be proven right.
It wasn’t a waste of time to pursue this. The portal was a multi-purpose chaos device, not just transport.
“I have no reason to assume sabotage,” he said. “But I’ll keep it in mind.” He took a deliberate look at his watch so that she noticed. “I have somewhere else to be, I’m afraid. Any further questions? I’m more than happy to give Suva a call and smooth things over. You can’t get a more meaningful apology than the APS science and technology commissioner calling personally to apologise for faulty equipment, can you?”
“That’s very kind of you,” Makris said. “But I don’t want to escalate matters. Leave it with me.”
“You sure?”
“If the commissioner calls personally, it makes things look more serious than they actually are. And it’s unusual for you to be here rather than in Seoul. They’ll imagine all kinds of things.”
Ah, she was backing off. She needed to play this down as much as he did. Someone getting their ear chewed off by angry diplomats would have jumped at the chance to hand the shit-parcel to someone else.
“I just happened to be here at home when the quarantine kicked in,” Pham said. He’d talk to his people in Fiji and check out the local sentiment anyway, because there was no point in putting Makris on his blacklist if she was just inept. It wasted the resources he’d have to put into finding or embroidering some misbehaviour to bury her with. “But you have a point.”
Pham now had a three-hour drive ahead to get home to Sydney. He’d pace himself. Those hours were precious, solitary thinking time and he was in no hurry to run into Louise if she was home at the moment. He had no idea because he didn’t want to find out. If she was doing anything that might compromise him, someone from the department — his old department, not APS — would tip him off.
Who did he think he was fooling? Everyone knew she lived her own life, so it was ridiculous keeping up appearances when nobody cared if an APS commissioner had an unhappy marriage. The pretence was taking time and effort that he needed to put into the job. He’d have to talk to Louise about a divorce again, but for the next few hours, he’d forget about her, think, make a few calls, and stop off for dinner along the way.
He called up some suitably inoffensive instrumental tracks on the stereo for background noise, no lyrics to distract him, and replayed the conversation with Makris in his head. He was on much thinner ice with Terrence since the die-back debacle. He knew it because he was still in his job. Terrence wanted him inside the tent for some reason, possibly saving him as a sacrifice for later, or else he thought Pham valued his power and perks so much that he would now be more malleable in exchange for keeping it. Bloody fool — Terrence couldn’t understand people who didn’t see political office as the sum of their existence. It was just a way of getting things done, and when it didn’t, Pham would move on. Its sole purpose was letting him serve and preserve his country, and his country wasn’t APS.
He’d fucked up royally over Abbie Vincent, though. He really should have spotted her. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know what a terrorist looked like. On the plus side, it had certainly moved things in a direction that he could exploit. If he’d wanted to weaken APS’s control of its member nations, introducing an existential crisis like die-back was a crude but effective way to do it. He’d never have done it deliberately, because it was impossible to control once it was in the wild, and it put his own country at risk, but he could find a way to take advantage of it.
So where did he go from here? The helicopter incident might come back to haunt him, but Terrence wanted his plausible deniability. As long as he kept imagining the worst, he’d let it all stay buried, so he was just using Makris to test the toxicity of whatever Pham was dabbling in. Yes, it made sense tactically, but Terrence could have picked someone better to do the job. On the other hand, maybe he saw Makris as blindly loyal, and that was worth fifty IQ points in politics.
It didn’t matter. Pham had a job to do. He’d missed a chance to get closer to seizing that portal technology and he’d lost his bait as well. He lowered the driver’s side window to enjoy the warm night air and thought it all through again.